Aric's Time

I'll start with my favorite part, sports. Since the first week of school, a group of us Expat teachers have been playing basketball every Wednesday for a couple of hours. That is still continuing and I'm still loving most of the games. Some days we have around 15 people and that makes it hard to play a game, we usually split into three teams which makes it better but that still means that you sit out every other game or so.
More recently, some of the HS juniors and seniors have challenged the male teachers to a friendly game of 7 on 7 American football. We play every Thursday and it has been an absolute blast. I realized yesterday that I haven't played an actual game of football since last November at the Winfield Rec Center. It's pretty fun and we usually have 6-8 of us teachers against 8-10 High Schoolers, they sub and only play with 7 (although they could use all 10 and still lose). We've played a couple of weeks now and the score is 8 TD's to 0. The third game is today after school. What was neat about getting to play some football is that I was able to go and get some cleats from our "Dicks Sporting Goods" store Decathlon; and you all know how much I love my shoes :)
I've also been playing some Europe Football, AKA soccer, with all the teachers from SHS. There was a tournament between the local schools and our school the past couple of weeks. Our overall record was 2 and 2. The first couple of games I didn't get to play for more than a minute each because it was 7 on 7 and the Chinese teachers were a bit better than me and much more vocal about their playing time. Fortunately, the last game we had, only 7 of us were there at the start so I played the first 10 or so minutes; that was exciting. Even more so is that I almost scored and caught the attention of the Chinese teachers. Today one of the English PE teachers came up to me and said that the coach asked me to join the games they play every Tuesday; pretty stoked about that. I'll now have an athletic thing on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday every week. And best of all, none of them are just strictly running!!!

As for "school" stuff, I'm still doing a lot of nothing every day and somehow staying sane. I've visited so many websites using Firefox's Stumble-upon, it's an add-on that takes you to a random site depending on your likes and dislikes, pretty neat stuff. A good thing though is that I am extremely caught up with everything going on in the world of sports, lots of ESPN reading. Lately, I've been getting these little, what I like to call "chores" from Helen. She's been having me do little monotonous things that she doesn't have "time" to do. The things range from writing e-mails and letters to creating activities for her 9th grade ESL class. It's quite boring but at the same time it helps pass the time. My biggest assignment I've gotten recently is the Speech Contest here at the HS; it's evidently a big deal to the high mucky-mucks. I've created the judges scoring sheet as well as the requirements and questions the students have to use. I also received a letter letting me know that I am going to be one of the judges for this thing as well; I know, I'm a big deal. Ha! I've also been doing some writing for the SHSID website, like little blurbs about small things like the soccer team I was on and such; nothing worthwhile but again, something to do. I've heard that I'm going to, at some point in time, be the person who reviews the English version of the website and check it for grammatical errors and fix the ones I find.

Other than that, I've been doing pretty much what Melanie's been telling you guys. The Fabric Market was pretty sweet and I plan on getting a lot of pants made, as well as some awesome leather gloves that will rival my brother-in-law Brent's; don't be too jealous though, they'll probably fall apart in the first snow storm.

I hope everything is just super fantastic with everybody back home. I miss you all a whole lot, talk to you later.

aric

written by  AricMelanie on November 4 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: China!
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